Over the time I have infected a lot of my friends with my passion for poker. For that reason I have felt responsible for them and wanted to make sure they will be able to enjoy the game as much as possible which includes having success as soon as possible. More important than that however was to help them avoid losing a big amount of money with a bad hand due to inexperience and thus losing interest. After taking a close look at some new players’ first steps I have soon come to a conclusion as to what I want to teach people who are new to the game of poker.
Texas Hold’em, Omaha, Seven Card Stud, Five Card Stud, Razz, Five Card Draw – these are variants of poker. If a professional player is successful in just one of them he will be commonly referred to as One Trick Pony by his colleagues. However you aren’t born a successful poker player and therefore should concentrate on one variant to begin with. We will decide to focus on the one that is most popular at the moment in order to find tables to play at any given time. That obviously makes Texas Hold’em the game to play. Texas Hold’em itself is played in several varieties, Fixed Limit, Split Limit, Pot Limit and No Limit. Based on the previous principle of going with the most popular game we will focus on No Limit Hold’em (NLHE). The final decision will be whether we want to play Cash Games (also called Ring Games) or Tournaments. I found out that for most new poker players Tournaments are more fun than Cash Games (additionally they are safer as you can only lose your Buy-In and the Tournament fee). And since fun is our main objective – even more so while still learning the game – we will play No Limit Hold’em Tournaments.
In my previous blog entry about bankroll management I mentioned a special form of Tournaments, the Sit&Gos (SNG). Buy-Ins for SNG Tournaments can range from a few cents up to several thousands of dollars. They don’t have a time schedule but will commence once a certain amount of players have registered for the Tournament. This amount can vary from 2 up to a few hundred players. A very common variant are the Single-Table SNGs. You simply register at a Single-Table SNG which usually will consist of 9 or 10 players. The Buy-In is for example $5+0.50 and ten players are seated at the table. That means $5 will go to the prize pool per player which makes it a total of $50. 50 cents per player will stay with the poker room as the so called Tournament fee (the equivalent to the rake in Cash Games). Each player now receives a set amount of chips – once you lose all your chips (stack) you are out of the game. The SNG is over when one player has won all the chops at the table. The pay-out structure will usually be 50%, 30%, 20% for the top three positions which in our example would amount to $25 for the winner, $15 for the second and $10 for the third place.
Let’s now look at a Multi-Table SNG in our next example. You are playing in a SNG with 45 participants. In this case this would mean 9 players per table on 5 tables. The Buy-In is set at $3+0.25, so the prize pool will be at $135. Again each player will receive the same amount of chips at the start of the Tournament and play commences. Once the first people start dropping out the remaining players will be re-seated every now and then in order to make sure the amount of players at each table will be approximately the same. At one point there will be 9 players left in the Tournament who will be seated at one table, the Final Table. Just like in the Single-Table SNG the Tournament will be over once one player has won all the available chips. Typically the pay-out structure for a Tournament like this would be $6 for the 7th position, $9 for the 6th, $12 for the 5th, $15 for the 4th, $21 for the third, $30 for the second and a nice $42 for the winner.
As beginner it can be a comfortable feeling to know that you will not lose more than a pre-determined amount of money instead of getting caught in a losing spiral in a Cash Game. This alone can (and probably should) be a reason to concentrate on SNG Tournaments early on. In the upcoming blog entries I will shed some light on what to keep in mind in order to successfully play this kind of Tournament Poker. I still enjoy playing SNGs very much and my results there have been very satisfying for a long time now despite my early mistakes due to a lack of knowledge. It took me quite some time to manage to get back to break even after a bumpy start into my poker life but now SNG Tournaments are part of a winning and fun poker experience.
And even though I run the risk of repeating myself: Poker shall be fun right from the start!